I'm revising my WIP novel one scene at a time and finding places where I need to do lots of work. Specifically, I want scenes that pivot. A scene is self-contained section of the story. Characters come into a scene with a goal and they either reach their goal or not. The scene should have a ...
Fiction Notes
Believe in Your Story
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Scenes: The Skeleton of a Novel
You're a human being: you can stand up, sit down, or do a somersault. That's because you have a skeleton that gives your soft tissue a structure. Likewise, it's important to give your novel a structure that will hold all the soft murmurings about characters, places and events. It begins with understanding the structure of a ...
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Thanks, Optimus Prime: What the Transformers Can Teach Us About Plot
I am writing a science-fiction trilogy and I'd like it to have general appeal to kids and teens. So, recently, I went to see the new Transformers 4: Age of Extinction to see what I could learn. Here's one of the official movie trailers. If you can't see this video, click here. Transformer's Major Plot ...
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What Went Wrong? Story Conflict and How to Make it Stronger
In your story or novel, something must go wrong. Without conflict, there is no story. As you develop a plot, it's helpful to think about what is the worst thing that could happen and then figure out if you can make that even worse? The absolute worst thing--the thing your character fears most of all--MUST happen ...
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Chase: A Fast-Paced Plot
My current WIP novel has a subplot of a chase, which is one of the 29 possible plot templates. Chase Plots are pretty straight forward. There's a person chasing and a person being chased, the Chaser and the Victim. It's an action plot, not a character plot (though always, character should be as strong as ...
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5 Quotes to Plot Your Novel By
I am currently slogging through plot development of a new series of novels. Here are some helpful quotes. "A plot is just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what." Margaret Atwood. It is hard to narrow down the possibilities of a story to a particular "WHAT happened next?". It is a tricky ...